[Ads-l] Snowclone: Can a (derog) X get a Y?

[Wilson Gray]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Well, not officially, although it has been viewed as a quasi-epithet in =
> need of euphemistic cover in some contexts, as Bolinger and others have =
> noted: "he's a Jew" tends to be replaced by "he's Jewish" (which
> inevitably brings up the classic Jonathan Miller line, "I'm not a Jew,
> I'm Jew-ish--I don't go the whole hog.")  But what's interesting to me
> about the parallel between "Can a Jew get a table bib?" and  "Can a
> nigger get a table dance?" is the use of "yid" in Yiddish in very much
> the same way some black speakers use "nigger", to mean something very
> much like 'guy (presupposed to be in the relevant ethnic group)'.  There
> are countless jokes that start out with something akin to "So a yid
> walks into a bar...", modulo the cultural adjustments.  And needless to
> say "yid" is hardly anodyne when used by those outside the in-group,
> even if it doesn't rise to the level of being "the y-word".  So maybe
> there's a remnant of "a yid" in these occurrences of "a Jew" to refer to
> oneself, more "a guy [+Jewish]" than foreground the religion or ethnic
> identity.
>
> LH, hoping no apologies are needed...
>

I first came across this use of "yid" in Philip Roth's 1934 novel, _None
Call It Sleep_. Not yet having been born in '34, it was ca. 1963, when I
read it. At the time, I was immediately struck by the parallel between
Roth's characters' use of "yid" and the ordinary use in BE of "nigger" to
mean, "any regular dude not needing a specific ID for this anecdote to
work/for this reference to be understood." But this interpretation was
colored <har! har!> by my thinking that "yid" was only an insult. Later, it
occurred to me that "yid" used among yidn is no more *necessarily* an
insult than "nigger" used among niggers is, abstracting away from the push
by black comedians, beginning with Dave Chapelle, IME, to expand the use of
"nigger" as "guy" to include *any* male person, irrespective of race,
creed, color, nationality, or previous condition of servitude.

Nobody bothered to check this out, re "nigger," I reckon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZA32oHbC4

As for "Jew" being an insult, I've seen it so used in print since forever
and heard it so used in reality since ca. 1965 - the storekeeper was, in
fact, of Armenian ancestry. A friend gave me "the talk" back in '74. And
it's been done on the Comedy Channel - "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"?
- and, subsequently, discussed in these very pages.

-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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